Holy Heck It Won't Stop Raining

Have you noticed the precipitation? Unless you live in the Midwest or India, that is. (Although maybe it's been rainy in India. I haven't been checking.) But man, it's been a rainy week. Also a pretty slow week--which has been nice--EXCEPT for the one little bit of excitement, namely:


Elise broke her arm! Last Sunday night, Tony's house, playing tag with the cousins, ran into Jane and, in Elise's words, "before I knew it I was going down!" After overcoming the initial (justified) screams of pain, she was a brave little trouper at the Instacare (and, yes, the same Instacare where, two Sundays previously, we'd taken Ethan after the Nalley's Chili Incident.) We've been, until now, such an injury-free family. The lady at the Instacare says these things often come in threes, but I'm counting Forrest's Handlebar Palsy, so we're good.

(The Handlebar Palsy is almost gone, btw. Forrest says he's 95%. Just has a hard time sticking his pinkie in his ear and really wiggling things around in there.)

Elise was a double-trouper because she also performed in the 5th grade talent show, broken arm and all. She sang the Miley Cyrus song "The Climb" (kind of a good little song, actually) and purportedly did a great job. I say purportedly because they wouldn't let parents come! I know! Lame! She sounded great practicing at home, though, and she came home pretty pleased with herself. At the Instacare she was trying to think positive thoughts about her broken arm, and the fact that she's a "singer and not a gymnast" and could still perform in the talent show was top on her list. I'm glad that my "singer and not a gymnast" genes could come in handy for once. :-)

So other than Elise's "buckle fracture" and talent show success, it's been a pretty leisurely week. Lots of rain (did I mention?). I dragged Ethan and Wyatt to Ikea and bought myself a new bookcase so I could dive in head first to the "Great Hallstrom Family Book Project," which essentially meant dumping out all the books that had gathered in the kids' rooms--the hundreds, nay THOUSANDS of books, it seemed--and organize them in some kind of reasonable fashion. I ended up moving my books out of the downstairs bookcase and moving a bunch of the kids' books into it (easy readers, early chapter books, books they won't reread anytime soon), then moved my paperback fiction into the new bookcase and put it in my room. I was afraid it would make my bedroom look too cluttery, but you know what? People who own lots of books are going to have books in their shelves, and books are cluttery-looking things. It actually makes me really happy to walk up stairs and see my new bookshelf, design be darned:



So now we have the basement bookcase (kids' books, explained above); Forrest's office bookcase (Forrest-type books: businessy titles, true-life-adventure and history, occasional biography, some Malcolm Gladwells); entertainment center bookcase (church books, hardback fiction); my office bookcase (writing books, teaching books, poetry, short fiction, memoir, lit mags); kids' rooms bookshelves (self-explanatory); and my new bedroom bookcase (paperback fiction--mostly). I also have a couple of boxes of books in the storage room that I don't particularly like or want. If you enlarge the picture and see any title you'd like to borrow, let me know. It's a regular library around here.

Oh! One last thing. A friend of mine posted this on Facebook and the part of me that loves movies, combined with the part of me that spends too much time online, combined with the part of me that's slightly sentimentally cheesy, really liked it. If your week is kinda slow and you have thirteen minutes, enjoy:

A Reel Transformation
Uploaded by theschu. - Watch feature films and entire TV shows.

And now it's raining again. No, not raining. Hailing! Here's a picture of Dad and Daughter on Father's Day, watching the hail:



Which brings me to . . . Happy Father's Day to my Dad and Grandpas and the father of my own chitlins, the best father any mother could ask for. Love you all!